How Do I Choose the Best Community Development Practices?

COP (Community of Practice), literal translation in Chinese is a community of practice. So what exactly is a community of practice? Why do we need it? How to achieve it? This is what we are discussing now.

Knowledge Practice Community

What is a community of practice?

McKinsey, an internationally renowned management consulting company, believes that enterprise information systems will shift from supporting transaction processing, integrating business logic and workflow functions to supporting functional systems for employee communication and online learning. Such flexible technologies and systems can support communities of practice, the needs of knowledge management in this new era. What exactly is a community of practice?

Synthesizing some points of view, we can define it this way. The practice community is a group of participants (can be members of the organization, external experts, or even consumers) because of a common purpose, theme, interest, or even a little connection (Can be a part of a job, a series, etc.), and an informal, unstructured network community that comes together.

For this definition, we need to focus on three points: 1. First, it is a community. The so-called community is the collection of people, groups of people, and reflects the relationship between people. String 3

2. Secondly, it is a virtual community, that is to say, the connection between people is made through the Internet, rather than face-to-face conversation in the traditional sense. 3. Finally, the community of practice constitutes an informal group often mentioned in our organization and management. In organizations, formal teams are collectives that are established by working business relationships, while informal teams are groups that are not formed by formal working relationships. As there is no formal distribution of powers and responsibilities, it is a loose organization. Obviously, in a company, these two groups will appear. Usually the community of practice may consist of people who do the same job, or it may include employees from different companies and different departments who have similar skills and expertise, such as the CIO Club, etc.

There are many sayings in the practice community. Although it is various, it is actually a content, such as: Learning Community (LC), Special Interest Group (SIG), etc., but it is not as high as CoP. The specific community of practice includes the following three elements: domain, community, and practice. 1. Field: the subject that everyone cares about.

2. Communities, including: boundary definitions, experts, novices, and advanced experts

3. Practice, including: explicit learning outcomes, community knowledge, and explicit tacit knowledge

Why do we need a community of practice?

The practice community, as an informal organization, has created informal communication channels for businesses. It will help companies operate in at least the following three ways.

Emotional communication

The practice community serves as an informal channel and finds a way for members of the organization to communicate emotionally. An enterprise is made up of people. There is more than just a working relationship between people. People need emotional communication. Artificially inhibiting it will produce an "underground organization". Rather than letting it develop irregularly, it is better to positively guide its development. The practice community is a good way.

The virtual nature of the community of practice also provides open communication possibilities for people to communicate. We can see that the advent of the Internet era has made people who were originally shy speak boldly on the Internet. Many of the original ones that are not easy to say and inconvenient to speak have become acceptable because of the novelty of the Internet. Therefore, the practice community has promoted the emotional communication between people to a certain extent, helped to eliminate communication barriers, and harmonized employees.

Sharing of knowledge and skills

This is the main and most important function of the practice community. Enterprises often cannot motivate people's innovation potential because of the non-flow of knowledge, and often lose some knowledge due to the movement of employees. Communities of practice provide a clear channel for people to exchange knowledge and skills. In work, people take departments as units, and in the practice community, the boundaries of departments and even enterprises are broken, and the boundaries of space and time are also broken. People can talk to people inside the company, or they can find experts outside the company to consult; people can be in the same geographical location, or they can be in Tiannanhaibei; people don't need to make an appointment for a certain topic like before Ask and communicate anytime, anywhere. This is not possible with traditional salons and clubs. Virtuality is here again to the fullest.

According to statistics from IDC, in 2001, the total expenditure of knowledge management systems for U.S. companies was about 4 billion U.S. dollars, 50% of which were related to the establishment of a practical community system. The potential is $ 6 billion to $ 7 billion. Why are so many companies willing to use such a large hand to build a community of practice system? It is precisely because enterprises see that knowledge sharing will catalyze innovation and the construction of learning organizations, and this is an important driving force for improving the competitiveness of enterprises in the era of the knowledge economy and a key factor in forming competitive advantage.

The community of practice may not immediately make a direct financial contribution to the company. However, the learning organization atmosphere, the corporate culture that is willing to share and exchange experiences, and the manifestation of knowledge and assets in the business process of the company It can consolidate the centripetal force of employees, thereby forming a sustained long-term core competitiveness of the enterprise.

Helps improve management efficiency

The community of practice promotes emotional communication and knowledge sharing among employees, and the company has formed cohesion and centripetal force, which has paved the way for the improvement of management efficiency. However, we still face the deficiency of effective communication. When employees suddenly receive a job, what do they want me to do? Why am I doing this? On the surface, if you do nt say it, you can do it right away, but you can always mutter in your heart. How can you guarantee the energy and quality of your work?

The practice community provides us with a platform to fully communicate the corporate mission's major goals and specific work goals, gradually forming a consensus, which will effectively improve communication costs at work and greatly improve management efficiency. At the same time, virtual, digital information is conducive to preservation, inspection and continuous reflection and improvement.

We have seen that the virtual and informal nature of the practice community, which opens multiple communication channels for enterprises, will greatly promote the formation of collective advantages for enterprises and go beyond simple human resource aggregation. In the e era, our truly scarce resource is not information, but knowledge in people's heads. Therefore, we must make better use of existing knowledge to create and innovate. By combining the processing capabilities of data, information technology, and human creativity, we can survive and compete vigorously in the era of knowledge capital.

The IT community is inseparable from the practice community

Earlier, we mentioned that virtuality has a great effect on community communication, but the realization of virtual networks is achieved through information technology. IT technology has become a booster for people to seek knowledge, spread knowledge, and apply knowledge. Although most experts agree that the social factors of the practice community-the establishment of trust, the role of culture, etc., are the key factors for the success of the practice community, however, IT technology as the material basis of the integrated information management system cannot be avoided One of the important driving forces is the technical support for the continued prosperity of the practice community. String 9

The rise of the concept of knowledge sharing and the emergence of practical communities have made people transplant information systems to network platforms. The application of network technology has greatly promoted the prosperity of the practice community. In this area, there are some IT tools that can help build a community of practice. 1.Resource tools

A tool similar to the Yellow Pages telephone query book, a database of best practices, primarily for capturing and extracting knowledge. Communication tool string 4

For example, e-mail and web page tools are the most commonly used methods for exchanging document knowledge. Collaboration tools

Refers to systems such as discussion groups, message boards, and event rooms that facilitate the communication of human resources with specialists with expertise. 4. Workflow

Workflow applications help deal with business activities such as project management, problem solving, customer service, and innovation.

These applications use and do not exclude existing information systems, such as ERP, CRM, SCM, and so on. On the contrary, combining these tools of practical communities can increase communication within the organization, greatly promote the operation of the organization, and improve organizational performance. In short, the motivation for using IT technology in the community comes from reducing the cost of communication between members in the organization and the cost of searching for information by people, thereby promoting all-round communication within the organization and helping to stimulate people's creativity. For the community of practice, IT technology is an essential driving force.